138. In The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, this sonnet was printed with variations from the present text in eight of its lines. In general, the present version seems the better one and probably represents Shakespeare's revision of the poem published ten years before the collected sonnets appeared.
141. 9. five wits. Common sense, imagination, fancy, estimation, memory.
144. This sonnet appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, with some unimportant changes in text. (Cf. note on sonnet 138.) Drayton's sonnet, 'An evil spirit, your beauty, haunts me still,' published also in 1599, has certain resemblances to this sonnet. That Drayton took a hint from Shakespeare seems more probable than that Shakespeare was indebted to Drayton.
145. This sonnet seems out of place in this series on the 'female evil.' It is written in octosyllabics; and it depicts a woman quite different from that mistress, 'black in deeds,' whose baneful influence upon the poet has been described in the preceding sonnets.
146. 1, 2. Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, Fool'd by these rebel powers that thee array. In the Quarto, the second line of this couplet is misprinted 'My sinful earth these rebel powers that thee array.' In place of 'My sinful earth,' repeated from the first line, many readings have been proposed, such as: 'Foil'd by'; 'Slave of'; 'Thrall to'; 'Starved by.' The reading of this text is as plausible as any other.
153, 154. These two sonnets are alternative versions of an epigram by Marianus, a Byzantine writer of about the fifth century A. D. There were sixteenth-century translations of this epigram both in Latin and in Italian; in Giles Fletcher's Licia, 1593, there is another very free adaptation of it.
